Friday, October 23, 2009

Something to Think About: "The US stock market is overvalued by 40%"

Smithers is pretty sharp but he's been bearish as long as I can remember.
From FT Alphaville:

Andrew Smithers, of London-based research house Smithers & Co, is not a man who has any truck with nonsense. Particularly when it comes from the mouths of stockbrokers.

In his latest report, The US Stock Market: Value and Nonsense About It, he takes to task those who claim US equities are still cheap:

As we have remarked before, valid approaches to value are disliked by many practitioners as they get in the way of business. As is inherently likely, and as a glance at Chart 1 will confirm, the stock market has been underpriced around 50% of the time. Those who sell shares would rather it were cheap 100% of the time and therefore prefer invalid metrics. The ones used vary from time to time, as those employed are restricted to those which currently give the desired answer that “stocks are cheap”.

Smithers says there are only two ‘valid’ ways to value the market....MORE